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Obesity Contagious?
An anonymous reader writes "University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have found that certain human viruses may cause obesity, and by extension make being severely overweight a contagious condition. 'It makes people feel more comfortable to think that obesity stems from lack of control,' the lead researcher says. 'It's a big mental leap to think you can catch obesity.' But other diseases once chalked up to environmental factors, like stomach ulcers, are now known to stem from infectious agents."
Here's an interesting report from FP Magazine on obesity as a global epidemic. Interesting to note that obesity seems to occur independent of the financial factors that you would assume cause obesity. Report is a PDF download. tcd004
There are some staggering data in there regarding the extent to which humans mimic the behavior of similar others. For example, there are statistically significant increases in the number of teenage-couples killed in car accidents among those teenage-couples who recently heard about accidents where teenage couples were killed. The increase is not observed in teenage-couples who didn't hear about the recent accidents, and is not observed among singleton teenagers or older couples who have been exposed to the news. These results have been repeated with a wide range of demographic groups, on a wide range of phenomena, and have been found to be consistent and strong. Hmm, notice a rash of mine accidents recently? Yes, I'm sure it's media focus-bias to some extent...
I really urge you to check that book out if you're interested in the instinct-level mental processes that control us without our being aware of them, or if you want to be..ah...evil?
Despite my attempts to keep this comment civil, I'm sure some will take offense...
Look, the cause of obesity is really very simple: the human body (and its ancestors) evolved in environments in which food was scarce, and during that time mechanisms came into being which helped to deal with that scarcity. As a result, it has built-in mechanisms to ensure that there will be sufficient energy store for the body to use for all but the most drastic of food shortages. These mechanisms include the fat store, the tendency for fat to accumulate much more easily than it's used, and an appetite control mechanism that encourages overeating (since who knows when the next meal will become available?).
Now take the human body and put it into an environment where all the food one could ever want is easily available for the taking (all it requires is a small amount of money). What do you expect will happen?
Well, duh...the body will behave as it always has: under the assumption that while food might be plentiful now, it's not likely to be plentiful for long, so better stock up now while it can.
And thus, obesity.
And the reason obesity is so difficult to deal with, and why sustained weight loss has such a lousy track record (95%+ failure rate), is simple: to fight obesity, you have to fight your own body's instinctive drive to "save up for a rainy day".
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Contrast that with America, where many technology parks and shopping centers don't even have proper sidewalks, and where the fastest, cheapest food you can get is at McDonalds, and it's no wonder Americans are fat.
Hmm- I think that we focus too much on weight and not enough on health. If someone is rail thin because they crash diet and are malnourished, that is not healthy...
But eating fresh non processed foods and getting daily exercise is healthy for anyone.
Obesity in the US is becoming a public health emergency. Did you see the 6 day series in the New York Times about Type II diabetes? It showed some people who couldn't stop eating junk food, even though it would mean they would lose a foot or go blind...
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Hence the "automobile culture" remark made by the other guy.
When I was living in Europe, specifically Germany, people viewed someplace that took half-an-hour away as pretty long and a city 2 hours away as a "trip". It was the norm to be able to work/bike to the local grocery store 5-15 minutes away (for that mode of transport) and get what you need. For work, lots of people took the train, which also required walking.
Holland is even greater in bike usage.
Part of the reason that Europe has everything close together is that stores, restaurants, etcetera can be comfortably intermingled amoung the neighborhoods. The only thing I saw zoned "away" from other things was industrial.
In America, rural zoning tends to be much more isolationist - suburbs are islands to themselves - without a store in sight. It's quite depressing actually. It also leads to the "not being able to walk or bike anywhere" syndrome.
"What they will conveniently forget is convervation of energy: The only way someone can gain weight is by eating too much... End of discussion".
Unless you are an expert on human metabolism, you cannot possibly make such an assertion. And if you were, you wouldn't.
What you overlook is that human beings are animals, and hence complex biochemical factories, not simple heat engines. If you know how much petrol a car engine of a given capacity burns in a given time, you know how much energy it produces, right? (Even this is only broadly true). But animals are very inefficient converters of energy. I forget how much of the energy we use gets "wasted" as heat, but it's a large fraction. (Just as well, or we'd die of hypothermia). Other energy goes into running various chemical reactions, not all of which are necessarily indispensable or even useful.
As soon as you think about if for a few seconds, it's clear that the body has a lot of discretion in just how it uses the 200 calories you get from, say, eating a bun. These viruses could jam the "make fat" control hard over against the end stop.
Maybe you think it is fine for one person to eat 2900 calories a day, do little exercise, and stay thin; while another person eats 2000 calories, walks six miles and gains weight. But how is the second person going to control their weight in the long run? The only practical way we have of controlling calorie intake is our appetite. Have you ever tried measuring your exact calorie intake while eating a normal diet? It's far from easy. Moreover, how are people to know how much they should be eating, if it's 2000 for one person and 3000 for someone else of similar size, shape, and exercise habits? We can't all become dietary scientists, walking about with computers and clipboards, weighing every bite of food we eat.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
My wife and I put our son into daycare at 3 months. After maybe two months, we changed his formula intake -- 2, 8oz bottles instead of 3 4-oz bottles to try to shift his feeding into the daytime and get him off a nighttime bottle.
We got immediate "feedback" from the staff about "cutting" his intake. I had to explain to them that it was actually a net increase for daytime feeding (16 vs. 12 oz) and his overall intake was actually up by 4 oz. They politely disagreed and we said we'd change it back if problems arose. After a week it was a non-issue.
After thinking about it, I realized what the real issue was -- the staff liked to feed him more frequently and we believed they were actually using the feeding as a way to soothe him; the feeding times for the bottles varied quite a bit. By cutting him to two bottles a day, they were "losing" a soothing option.
It was then that I started thinking about the staff; all of them would qualify as overweight, three of them would probably qualify as obese and one of them probably is pushing the morbidly obese standard.
I started wondering if the childhood obesity phenomenon couldn't partly be traced to daycare; at an early age, if given the opportunity, the staff will use food the way they probably use it themselves -- as a way to soothe and manage anxiety.
I'm probably stretching this a lot, but it doesn't seem entirely unrealistic. Kids in increasingly large numbers since the 1970s have been put into daycares, and they've been subjected to food as a behavior modifier -- soothing babies, calming toddlers, and so on. The fact that daycare providers are, by and large, at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder probably also means that the kids are being subjected to the caregivers own poor habits as well.
I know there are other influences (TV, advertising, parental disregard, etc), but I do wonder if bad food choices in daycare doesn't lay the groundwork for a fairly deep-seated set of food/emotion connections that play out as the child gets older and has more opportunity to make their own food choices.
Don't forget that most of Europe's city planning was complete before the advent of the automobile. Older US cities tend to follow the European path more often that not (New York, Philly, Boston, Chicago). Generally speaking, the newer the city, the more likely lots of driving will be required. This is especially true the further west you go (Phoenix, Seattle, Los Angeles...San Francisco is aberrantly more like east coast cities, but probably because it was the west coast's first real city in the mid-19th century).
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I've been wanting to visit Europe for some time now, just haven't had the chance just yet. I do make the trip down to NYC pretty often, though. I park my car in Jersey City, and don't touch it again till I leave (we stay are a relative's flat there.) Take the train into the city, and just walk or take the subway to get places. I love it. Where I live, I have to drive to get anywhere and there is no real public transportation. I live in a suburb of Syracuse, NY (about 5 minute drive from the main part of the city.) It's not like a live in a little town or village.
Where I live I feel like I'm in the minority of people at a healthy weight. In NYC, I'm the norm. But then, there are many restuarants in the city with healthy food that tastes good (we ate at an amazing vegan place this weekend, Angelica Kitchen. It's on 12th St between 1st and 2nd Ave. Worth the wait if there is one!)
rm -rf
The issue you are missing here is that for some obese people, it's not excess storage, it's missallocated storage. They contract a virus that lives in and feeds on fat cells, so it encourages the person who has a healthy diet and who gets exercise to continue storing nutritional intake as more fat cells instead of as the muscle cells that they would have stored that nutrition as if they did not have the virus. That is what is being suggested by these studies.
This is also what is leading nutrition experts to question the portayal of obesity in and of itself as a health risk. It's just not the case that being over a certain weight means you are at risk for disease, it's an indicator that you will want to monitor certain things perhaps, but at the end of the day, skinny or fat, if you binge on sugar, you are at risk for diabetes.